Learning Object Repositories, Digital Repositories, and the Reusable Life of Course Content

Course management systems have gone mainstream. If your college d'esn’t
have one, it will. Richard Katz, director of the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied
Research (ECAR), describes this as an evolution from “ small, often
sub-rosa tools used by quirky faculty to streamline efforts or to illustrate
points with students in new and novel ways ” [Educause Review,
July/August 2003] to a dominant component of today’s education technology
landscape. Thousands of faculty are creating content and putting them in CMSes.
They’ve worked hard to create new digital learning exercises or convert
problem sets and lecture notes to digital format. The products of these efforts
are now scattered on the hard drives of faculty computers and the representations
of the online courses they teach.

DSpace - a digital library system
to capture, store, index, preserve, and redistribute the intellectual output
of a university’s research faculty in digital formats.http://dspace.org(last accessed March 29, 2004)

Because the work to produce online learning objects is more visible, often
involves effort beyond that which would have been expended to prepare traditional
course content, and frequently engages more people, its value has appreciated
over its former paper-and-chalk-board counterparts. Managing these pieces of
digital course content so they don’t have to be recreated every term and
can be reused by faculty has increasing appeal.

Most course management systems began with some form of content management.
Usually they provide a means of moving content from one instantiation of a course
to another. Getting the content out so that it can be used elsewhere, in another
system, for example, is another matter. However, as CMSes have proliferated,
so have the issues surrounding the management of the materials faculty prepare
for their courses.

The Intersection of Information Services and Learning Content

The suppliers’ interests traditionally organize the resources created
by faculty, acquired by libraries, and purchased from information vendors. They
are stored and managed in systems that require distinct access characteristics,
usually include different logins, and are structured in different ways, making
it difficult to exchange content among them. They are conceived and designed
as standalone systems instead of parts of a cohesive information resource fabric.
Rarely are course management systems organized to maximize scholarly or pedagogical
value, let alone configured to align with user preferences.

The current linkages between library systems and course management systems
are weak. Students may have URL links in their CMS to a library system to get
content they need for their course, usually having to login to the library system
in the process. To put content into their CMS-based course, both students and
faculty generally have to create or independently find and upload the digital
content into the CMS. This leaves little opportunity to interact with digital
content and the learning activity (encapsulated in modules of learning objects)
dynamically.

Work is going on to make it easier to bring content from libraries into CMSes.
The learner perspective, however, has been largely neglected. What do learners
need? They should be able to draw on digital assets from any resource, or repository,
that strikes them as useful—even if the rationale is serendipity—at
the exact moment when the learning activity calls for it. Today they can’t
do that.

Lightweight Digital Assets and Heavyweight Stewardship

Libraries tend to view their responsibility toward managing digital repositories
with robust, call them heavyweight policy guidelines. There are rules about
who can put things into the library repositories, what metadata is required
for submitted content, acceptable formats, and the implications of these formats
on the library’s ability to guarantee that they’ll be there and
accessible years later.

While there are a few institutional digital repository projects (e.g., the
California Digital Library eScholarship Repository, along with DSpace and Fedora,
previously mentioned), there is a rapid proliferation of lightweight digital
repositories (DR-Lite). These are learning object repositories (see sidebar)
holding ephemeral learning assets that characterize the majority of what faculty
and students use in online learning environments.

Belts Project - The Basic eLearning Tool Set (BELTS)
has been developed by The Le@rning Federation (TLF) to demonstrate the distribution,
management, and use of learning objects and to aid investigation of requirements
for eLearning environments by Australian and New Zealand school jurisdictions.
http://belts.sourceforge.net/

The Learning Federation - The Le@rning Federation is
an initiative of State and Federal governments of Australia and New Zealand.
Over the period 2001-2006 the Initiative aims to develop online interactive
curriculum content specifically for Australian and New Zealand schools.http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/tlf/newcms/d2.asp

By referring to these materials as ephemeral, I don’t mean to diminish
their value or the work that went into their creation. Nevertheless, from the
library perspective they aren’t permanent and therefore are typically
treated differently.

Learning is loosely guided, as much directed by the learner as it is by the
intentions of the teacher. Therein lies the problem. Effective course management
systems will need to access multiple repositories (which will likely have different
policy frameworks) and determine which repositories are available and for what
purposes they can be used. The interactions among library repositories, learning
object repositories, and course systems are rife for misunderstandings of language,
policy, and purpose.

Content Lifecycles

Complex problems are like ecosystems. Understanding ecosystem dynamics provides
a window into their behavior, the process cycles, and the flow of critical nutrients
that sustain them. In this case, one critical indicator can help illuminate
the problem: to examine how digital content is created, organized, and managed
throughout its lifecycle.

Learning Object Definitions

“...a learning object is defined as any entity,
digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education,
or training.”

The JORUM+ project adopted the following definition: “A learning object
is any resource that can be used to facilitate learning and teaching that
has been described using metadata.”

This ecosystem view cuts across the boundaries between library and eLearning
communities. The islands of content have little migration or emigration. To
establish pathways among them requires attention to both the functional and
technical attributes of their systems. The challenge is to take a step back
and look beyond the subsystems. All components of the ecosystem must follow
common rules. This analogy suggests that institutional infrastructure must share
functional and technical services. Information system services are made of components
like authorization, authentication, group management, and digital repository
communications.

Only by taking a step back and expanding the scope of the system can we start
to see it as made up of components that share services rather than idiosyncratically
using their own. It’s time to look at learning content lifecycles to gain
a new understanding of eLearning and library co-existence.

McLean, N., and Lynch, C., (2003). "Interoperability between Information
and Learning Environments—Bridging the Gap: A Joint White Paper on behalf
of the IMS Global Learning Consortium and the Coalition for Networked Information"
http://www.imsglobal.org/DLims_white_paper_publicdraft_1.pdf%20(last accessed March 28, 2003)

OpenAFS, a distributed file system based on a client-server architecture for
file sharing, providing location independence, scalability, and transparent
migration capabilities for datahttp://www.openafs.org/ (last accessed
March 29, 2004)

Zope, an open source application server for building content managements,
intranets, portals, and custom applicationshttp://www.zope.org/ (last accessed
March 29, 2004)